Connecting Cartographers and Neo-Geographers.

Yesterday I went to the Society of Cartographers summer school in Portsmouth to talk about this blog. Steve Chilton who I interviewed last month (part I, part II) had nagged me into giving another talk. I went because I realised that the purpose of this blog is partly to try and bridge the gap between the people building maps with the new web tools (often termed neo-geographers) and the cartographic community. Part of the problem is that neo-geographers get a lot of their information via RSS through blogs, forums and social bookmarking services like del.ic.ious. As expected, a show of hands in my session yesterday revealed that most cartographers present didn't use RSS or know what it was. Add to that the lack of blogs about cartography (if you know of any, please email me) and you can see the niche I'm trying to fill with this blog.

Map of Portsmouth wall mural, courtesy of 'some fool (old school)' on flickr.com

If any of the delegates read this, thanks for your feedback, I'll get onto discussing your thoughts in some further posts, I did wonder if any of you found the above mural and what you think of it? :)